Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @08:04PM
from the try-it-out dept.

mattydread23 writes "Amazon is getting into the desktop virtualization space. This is potentially huge news for providers like Citrix, but as writer Nancy Gohring points out, the company is starting small. Very small: 'The administrator console only allows managers to provision five WorkSpaces at a time. It's possible that will change when the service becomes generally available. For now, Amazon is accepting sign ups for a limited preview of the service. '"

Amazon WorkSpaces clients are available for both Windows and Mac computers as well as for the iPad, Kindle Fire, and Android tablets. When WorkSpaces are provisioned for users, they will get an email containing details on how they can download the clients. The WorkSpaces PC or Mac client provides users with full access to their desktop and includes support for multiple monitors, audio, and video.

Linux support would make this more interesting so I could retask some old desktops and laptops with a linux thin client to let them access their Amazon virtual desktop. Though $50/month for a virtual desktop that includes MS Office seems a little expensive when a Dell desktop with Office Pro costs around $800 - 16 months worth of Amazon's pricing.

Us old farts who saw the older farts scratching their heads over virtual desktops and wondering, "and this is different from dumb terminals or xwindows... how gain?" and being thrown aside for not knowing the new technology.

IT is worse than music - at least music will pay SOME homage to the previous artists.

Next post, I'll describe how the entire "entrprenuerial" community in Silcon Valley are a bunch of rip-off artists.

You know, this kind of thing has been tried pretty much since the mainframe was invented. After that it was timesharing, after that it was dumb terminals, after that it was thin clients, after that it was virtualization, after that it was cloud, after that... well, and here we are. Hi Amazon.

Look, ever since Moses descended from the Mountain and brought with him two stone tables, 0 and 1, and said to us Thou Shalt Not Goto, and other things... people have been trying to get this off the ground. And it's always ended in failure because it's a bad idea.

The fact that it's Amazon's turn to derp it up shouldn't get your hopes up... and neither should adding Linux support. Or MacOS, or anything else. It's technology that has died more times than the Daleks have in Doctor Who... and yet it stubbornly comes back in via another whack plot-twist... also, just like the Daleks.

It's technology that has died more times than the Daleks have in Doctor Who

It reminds me also of the "anyone can program" meme and products that promise to replace your software engineers with your secretary or even more improbably that programs will write themselves after you dictate to them what it is that you want, ala Star Trek. These sorts of ideas always rise from the dead, no matter how many times they fail, because some managers just cannot stand the fact that some workers are necessary and that relative to the secretary or the burger flipper, they cost more. Of course, it

Centralized remote "desktops" and remote computing were always a good thing. There are many many advantages to having a remote desktop that is yours that you can access from any number of devices from any number of locations. It makes sense for the user for the reasons I stated above and it makes sense to IT departments providing them because of ease of management, backups, deployments etc. The price for maintaining and managing large pools of desktops is coming down and the dust is settling on the proto

The fact that it's Amazon's turn to derp it up shouldn't get your hopes up... and neither should adding Linux support. Or MacOS, or anything else. It's technology that has died more times than the Daleks have in Doctor Who... and yet it stubbornly comes back in via another whack plot-twist... also, just like the Daleks.

The reason it keeps popping up is because there are valid reasons for it. Just as there are valid reasons for decentralized.The problem is that every iteration is hyped as being the perfect solution for all situations everywhere, whereas in reality it's just one of a number of possible solution for a specific subset of situations.

It's not hyped that way. At least I don't think so. It is the isolated IT/IS people that only see what they do and say no way, it's stupid, it doesn't run Linux, I need a 8 core processor and 24GB RAM, super fast raid 10 on SSD and I do 3D rendering and upload 1TB files to process, this is the fail, it can never work!

We guess what...Outside of the developer/programmer/system administration world there is a whole different thing happening with businesses and people that sit down in front of a computer to work. The other 99% of people using a computer in a business atmosphere do NOT need what you do and a standard load Windows 7/8 desktop with 4GB-6GB ram does perfectly fine for them as long as they have their apps that they use to do the work they need to do.

Aren't those the same people for whom VDI works so well for? They don't need to know, or even care where their desktop is.

Few corporate IT/IS people care of their hardware runs linux - they care if it runs Windows Server. Linux is for the geeks in Silicon Valley, not for mature corporations.

I switched a couple years ago to running my daily work desktop via a VM on a server, at HD resolution, and it works great. The only time I remember I'm in VNC is when I try to play a video; not because the video stutters but because I haven't taken the time to hook up a network sound adapter yet.

You need fast networks, fast CPU's, proper segmentation, and lots of cheap storage for it to work.

Yeah, it's wildly overpriced for the value it provides. I'm generally fond of Amazon and I think Bezos is a genius but I think this idea is a real dud. Computers suitable for most office drones just aren't very expensive and any company that cares about employees being able to access desktops from remote locations already have VPNs setup.

I'd argue that _not_ using Amazon would give the business a bit more control.

Also; computers are usually replaced based on service rather than performance these days. If a company buys a dell laptop with 3 years on site service, then it's most likelly replaced after 3 years just because it need a SLA to go with it. And a new computer with SLA cost almost the same as an old computer with SLA.

Overpriced? Probably for big shops. Don't forget MS typically gets a piece of the action for every "device" that connects remotely to their servers. For smaller shops that don't have the infrastructure already in place hosted VDI *might* be the right call.

The industry trend is to virtualize as much as possible throughout the datacenter and stack. In the long run it will have some interesting implications but it won't be cheap in the short run.

I don't necessarily agree that every company should just drop their hardware and get thin clients...

I think the right type of company, with the right amount of users will save money long term by properly building their own private cloud and offering virtual desktops. Even if that private cloud of theirs is being managed by a 3rd party.

100+ users I would say go create your own private cloud.

You are a collection agency / call center? Even better reason for this.

Linux support is the only thing that would make this interesting. My users have a hard time remembering if something is saved on their desktop or the shared network drive. You give them a PC with a windows desktop and a link that opens a remote virtual desktop that's identical? They won't remember which desktop they saved things to. Plus, half your data is off in virtual cloud land in AWS and half is local to the computer. In fact, I take it back. Even with Linux this is an incredibly stupid idea that

They're providing 5 workspaces. Eventually someone will make a few accounts so they can have multiple sections of 5 workspaces and he/she will call them groups. Thus Amazon for Workgroups will be born.

Google Hangouts are mostly for general groups of people. I expect Google to release a version tailored to work groups as well.

Amazon for Workgroups. Google for Workgroups. It seems Windows was ahead of it's time.

---- Booth was a patriot ---- If you dont agree with me, dont bother replying as i dont care what you have to say ----

Booth was a murderer, a coward, and a traitor. "The South" was not populated by patriots--or at least, not American patriots--it was populated by traitors who wanted to keep human beings as property, and were willing to murder as many people as they had to in order to protect their unconscionably evil economic system operating.

For that matter, you're a coward for posting something so ridiculous and then preemptively telling us you "won't respond."

With that out of the way, why would i even want to debate your inaccuracies and complete misunderstanding of what happened, and why? ( And apparently an inability to read as well. Or at least comprehend simple sentences )

With that out of the way, why would i even want to debate your inaccuracies and complete misunderstanding of what happened, and why? ( And apparently an inability to read as well. Or at least comprehend simple sentences )

I'm under no obligation to follow your directions....But like all petty cowards, you continue to attack the messenger without defending the ludicrous assertion (that Booth was a patriot.) I say he wasn't: If you fail to respond directly to the argument you've both lost the debate and proven yourself a coward in the mix. It was slavery--100% slavery. None of those "other issues" could exist without the slavery issue. "State's rights" is a code-phrase for the "states' right to have slavery." If you think som

Lets see, you initiated an unsolicited attempt to instigate a debate with me where i have clearly stated there will be no debate, so yes, you are obligated to follow my directions. Conversely since you are incapable of understanding and/or following directions that even a 5 year old child could understand, i have no obligation to you in any stretch of the imagination.

You are the failure in this situation.. And i bet most any other venture in your life.

I've always wondered why Canonical is hitching it's wagon to advertising. I suspect because it's easy - but it's always seemed like there's an opportunity somewhere between EC2 virtualization and the benefits of remote X that would've meant they could've set up a "run on the cloud" type service that would be nicely integrated into the deskop.

Thin clients which can farm out their heavy lifting to EC2 (for say, graphics/CAD etc) seems like a possible winner if they could claim some referral money from it.

It's funny. A friend of mine was trying to pitch this DaaS stuff to me a month ago as his great new genius business idea. I think my exact words were "if this is a good idea, Amazon or Google will beat us to it and sell it cheaper." Hell, even if it's not a good idea they'll kill us. And it's not. Nerds just have no concept of economics.

There are good things to be said about vertical integration, economies of scale, etc., particularly when we're talking about the manufacture of automobiles or bulk steel or what have you. But I am a firm believer in decentralization whenever possible: local government, local foodsheds, solar power, local computing. The PC gave us that when I was a youngun'... and Big Iron has been trying to find a way to take it away ever since.

Right. My first PC occupied the entire first floor of the Science building and that was while I was a preteen. Centralization is okay for some things but I'm definitely more in the mind of a libertarian cluster pervading my universe. [That even sounds nice.] A veritable (virtual?) device cloud that connects or disconnects as suits, each autonomous (rule-guided) as required, and constrained by budget. Here, I'm personally hardware rich but well, my wallet (and accounts) look mighty bare. Others usually the o

I'm a head IT manager. Here's my take on it:
Wow, it's like a slow-responding piece of crap. If my hand feels like it's in sand with a wireless mouse's 300ms delay, just wait until my entire desktop is offsite! It's like upgrading it carrier pigeons. And the one thing I love about remote desktop environments is the complete inability to manage them, stop users from doing stupid stuff, and a complete lack of control over everything. Oh and the double layer problem where you technically have to be runnin

All nonsense. While I'm no fan of "desktop in the cloud" - anyone that uses RDP regularly knows that responsiveness is not that much of a problem anymore. As long as Amazon throws enough network & hardware resources at this it'll work fine. The real question is whether it's economical.

I disagree. I live in downtown Seattle, and with the fastest connection I can get locally, I still have a 190 ms ping to my ec2 servers at US West (Oregon). I've used remote desktop to a couple of Windows servers there. It is too slow to be usable.

You ought to talk to your ISP about the high latencies -- from the San Francisco Bay Area, from home, I have 105ms ping times to our East Coast AWS servers, and 58ms ping times to AWS Oregon. At the office, we have a better connection and I see around 85ms to the East Coast, and about 45ms to Oregon. I regularly use RDP to both sites and it works quite well. The 250ms to Sydney is more challenging.

So, firstly you'll be asked to reboot Windows, then your router. Then you'll be directed to the ISP's test website. Once it appears you are connected and get web pages, they'll try to hang up. If you persist past that stage, they'll probably disconnect the call at some point forcing you to restart from scratch.

So, firstly you'll be asked to reboot Windows, then your router. Then you'll be directed to the ISP's test website. Once it appears you are connected and get web pages, they'll try to hang up. If you persist past that stage, they'll probably disconnect the call at some point forcing you to restart from scratch.

Sounds like you have the wrong ISP -- this is a good time to plug my favorite ISP -- Sonic.net [sonic.net]. When you call tech support, you get to talk to a real support engineer, not a low paid customer service rep that only knows how to follow a script. When you tell him that you've already rebooted your border gateway and still see high latency and packet loss, he knows what you mean and doesn't have to page through his script to find out how to reply to a customer when he says "packet loss" and when you read the IP

The GP mentioned they were in Seattle. When I lived there, the city granted a monopoly to Comcast, but Comcast doesn't offer Internet access to much of the city. I was stuck with 1.5 Mbps DSL from Qwest. Using SSH over Qwest with the 250 ms ping to Level 3 was so annoying that I often went back to dial-up for the lower latency. To be fair, the consistency and reliability with Qwest was amazing. In four years, it only went down once , and I was able to get the full 1.5 Mbps from just about everywhere. I currently have Comcast, and while I love the higher speed, I miss having a reliable connection. I've had to give-up on online gaming because the connection goes down so many times per day.

So complain to your city representatives - tell them that you're tired of them granting a franchise license to a provider that provides substandard service. And tell them to encourage projects like Gigabit Seattle [gigabitseattle.com] to bring better internet service to the area.

> But don't blame Amazon for poor network latency to their datacenters

No one ever said it was. Go take your irrational hatred of Amazon elsewhere. They are a good company and the best cloud company in the world. Trying to build a strawman of your hatred of them to knock down is pitiful.

> when it's the fault of the local ISP.

And several posters were bitching about Qwest, CenturyLink, and Comcast. How in your world of stupid is that blaming Amazon? Just because you hate them doesn't mean that every single negative statement is about them. Most people here do not agree with your position.

You should feel bad for your pitiful attempt at Amazon trolling. You have so much trouble with reality that you should seek professional help.

Umm...I thought I was being an Amazon fanboi by pointing out that poor network latency is the fault of the user's ISP, not Amazon. Was I accidentally hating on them instead?

When you call tech support, you get to talk to a real support engineer, not a low paid customer service rep that only knows how to follow a script. When you tell him that you've already rebooted your border gateway and still see high latency and packet loss, he knows what you mean

Yeah, but for how long? I used to have that level of service with Comcast some years ago. They had a local call center with real engineers, and if Tier 1 didn't understand your question, they'd push you up to Tier 2 without a hassle. Even some of the Tier 1 people knew what ARP tables were and how DNS problems could screw up your service. Everyone was a native English speaker. I knew people who worked there. It was great!

Now they have a call center gods-know-where staffed by script-readers who do not

When you call tech support, you get to talk to a real support engineer, not a low paid customer service rep that only knows how to follow a script. When you tell him that you've already rebooted your border gateway and still see high latency and packet loss, he knows what you mean

Yeah, but for how long?

They've only been in business since 1994, so not even 20 years yet. That pales in comparison to AT&T/Bell's 100+ year history, but I think as long as their CEO and founder is in charge, they'll continue to provide great service. Of course, they are the little guy so they have to work harder. It remains to be see what happens if they become a dominant player, and while I'd like to see what happpens, I think there's little chance of them unseating the established telco and cable companies. Google has a be

Very funny. I mentioned Seattle so that should clue you in that because this is a liberal shithole, there are no choices and no competition. CenturyLink is the only company that offers access faster than dial-up on my block. Their second level support doesn't even know what the words latency or traceroute mean. There are several other ISPs trying to service my block, but the anti-business mayor is fighting them with everything he has. The mayor elect is pro-Comcast monopoly so he is going to be even worse. He has already publicly stated that he doesn't think the city should enforce service level or coverage minimums so expect Comcast to, as hard as it is to believe, get even worse. They'll probably drop even more unprofitable blocks in the city and further reduce their bandwidth.

In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.

Sounds like you and your other downtrodden citizens didn't spend enough time and money supporting your internet-friendly candidates - the election was just a few weeks ago, what did you do to promote and support your interests? Perhaps good internet just isn't that important to your fellow citizens, maybe it's time to move to someplace more aligned with your values. Or maybe it's just not that important to you and you just want to whine on Slashdot

Your crappy mouse aside, 300ms is sufficient to get halfway around the world; If I had to guess, your average latency to a big co like Google or Amazon shouldnt be much higher than 30ms. Its also not like minimizing perception of lag hasnt been figured out a million times before, with every online game ever, RDP, etc etc etc. Clientside prediction + efficient netcode can make the perception of lag all but disappear.

Wow, it's like a slow-responding piece of crap. If my hand feels like it's in sand with a wireless mouse's 300ms delay, just wait until my entire desktop is offsite! It's like upgrading it carrier pigeons. And the one thing I love about remote desktop environments is the complete inability to manage them, stop users from doing stupid stuff, and a complete lack of control over everything.

How can you be a "head IT manager" and not know how to manage your desktops (whether remote or local) with AD policies? Why would a remote virtual desktop give you less control than one sitting on someone's desk?

Because you, and your overpriced set of AD admins, will be spending all your time every day tweaking and overriding those settings. Most developers and systems people I know will revolt, actively or passively, against the necessary web of policies necessary to lock down Windows servers in large environments. They can, and will circulate, workarounds to get past IT's top down policies in such environments.

Desktops sitting around locally do provide large control over VLAN based security, firewalls, proxies,

Because you, and your overpriced set of AD admins, will be spending all your time every day tweaking and overriding those settings. Most developers and systems people I know will revolt, actively or passively, against the necessary web of policies necessary to lock down Windows servers in large environments. They can, and will circulate, workarounds to get past IT's top down policies in such environments.

So if you can't use AD to lock down your computers, how do you do it? If you start terminating people for intentionally violating security policy, the compliance rate goes way up. If your policies aren't important enough to require people to follow them, maybe they aren't necessary after all. Many corporations have regulatory or industry requirements that mandate a good security policy, and a violation (think HIPAA, SOX, PCI) that results in unapproved information disclosure can result in fines or even crim

I don't see how this is a benefit. So you need a desktop to run RDP to connect to virtualized desktop? Since you have to buy a PC for the user to physically sit in front of anyways, why not just run everything on that desktop to begin with? The only real benefit I can see is saving time "re-imaging" the base machine when the end user surfs to www.virus-and-malware-website.com, and frankly the I can't see that overcoming the cost of renting/owning hardware to provide virtual desktops. In terms of data securi

I know that this isn't quite the same as what Citrix does with its Xen Desktop and Receiver bits, but for those who do remote access to work with a Citrix product and do this with a Mac, I'm a bit frustrated that the Mac client is always a step behind.

Specifically, the Windows client now has USB routing and HDX features and this seems to be absent from their Mac client offerings. With a lot of organizations using IP conferencing (read: Lync), this is becoming a bit of a problem.

For the last year or so I've been using an Amazon EC2 small server, running Xubuntu Desktop (and accessed via NoMachine remote desktop) as my main development environment. I'm a LAMP developer who works at home a fair bit, and since I already had the EC2 server running a couple of client sites I decided to try and get remote desktop access to it, as described here: